1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a karaoke apparatus for displaying a background video (BGV) that matches a music mood produced by a karaoke song being performed.
2. Description of Related Art
Karaoke apparatuses display a background video matching a karaoke song being performed in order to augment the mood of the song. In recently developed on-line karaoke apparatuses, song data for performing a song and video data for displaying the BGV of the song are separate from each other. According to a genre of a song to be performed, suitable video data is selected for reproduction of the background video. Storing plural pieces of video data for one song genre allows reproduction of a different BGV every time a different song of the same genre is performed.
A play time of most karaoke songs are shorter than five minutes. However, some medley songs last nearly ten minutes. Therefore, conventional video data for BGV is edited into a piece of video that continues about ten minutes to cover such a long song.
Actually, the karaoke apparatus stores only a limited number of background video pieces. Therefore, performing karaoke songs of the same genre multiple times may occasionally reproduce the piece of the same background video. Increasing BGV data lowers the chance of repetitive reproducing of the same BGV piece. However, this requires to increase the number of memory disks for storing the BGV data, leading to increased production cost and running cost.
In addition, conventional karaoke apparatuses reproduce video data always from its beginning or top point in synchronization with the start of a karaoke song. Therefore, in most songs lasting within five minutes, only the first half of the video data is reproduced, the second half being not fully used if the time length of one piece of the background video is ten minutes.